If Activision does not see a female lead in the top five games that year, they will not have a female lead. And the people that don't want a female lead will look at games like Wet and Bayonetta and use them as 'statistics' to 'prove' that female leads don't move mass units.

This quote, attributed to a source within video game giant Activision, is one of the juicier elements of a news story on Gamasutra, which alleges that the company has effectively banned female lead characters from its roster. The article points out that since 2005, the only Activision games to revolve around female leads have been within girl-centered brands such as Barbie and Dora the Explorer. It also quotes former employees of development studio Treyarch who assert that the forthcoming action adventure True Crime: Hong Kong, was originally an entirely different game entitled Black Lotus about an Asian female assassin. "Activision gave us specific direction to lose the chick," a source on the project tells the site. True Crime: Hong Kong has a male lead.

Activision refutes the allegation at the end of the piece, but the comments section throws up a few interesting questions – one of which being, well, if games with female protagonists don't sell, then surely Activision is correct to rule them out of the production schedule, given that games cost tens of millions of dollars to develop these days?

There are some reasonably valid arguments for the dominance of male leads. In the mainstream videogame arena, audiences are still overwhelmingly male, and as the ability to identify with the character is often an important element of the experience – especially in a narrative-driven action game – is it so weird that male gamers prefer male characters? And as one commenter on the Gamasutra piece suggests, do male characters just make a more obvious fit in the physicalised and aggressive action genre? After all, most of the great Hollywood action movies have had male actors in the main roles.

It also seems that mainstream games with female leads have struggled in recent years. Mirror's Edge, Bayonetta and Wet are all intriguing examples – although it's certainly worth pointing out that none of these were conventional action adventure titles to begin with. It's interesting, in fact, that when designers have set out to innovate in the action sector, they've often led with female characters, almost as a symbol of their 'otherness'; we can add Jade in Beyond Good and Evil and Carla Valenti from Quantic Dreams' Fahrenheit to that list.

Fascinatingly, the two games that are most often used as examples of successful contemporary female-led titles are Portal and Metroid. But with both of these, the gender of the character is essentially sidelined, in Metroid because Samus wears full-body armour and in Portal because the first-person perspective leaves Chell unseen. In these cases, if the player desires, they can project male personas into the action.

Meanwhile, Lara Croft is possibly a misnomer as a successful female lead: the character, with her ridiculous breasts and tight shorts, arrived at the height of nineties lad culture, an FHM babe digitised into an interactive fantasy. If you plotted a graph that showed the diminishing sales of mags like Loaded against the diminishing critical responses to the post-Tomb Raider 2 titles, there would – apart from the odd blip – be a correlation.

In Japan, the best female characters have often appeared in ensemble casts. Jill Valentine, Chun-Li, Yuna – they have all carried games to some extent, but they've had to rise from earlier titles in which they appeared alongside male protagonists. That's a strange phenomenon; it's as though female characters have to work harder to prove their worth.

Of course, it's not great for mainstream video games to be so dominated by male characters, but then Activision is a business, and if the company believes that male characters are a better bet (and they dispute this), it's difficult to counter that. You just have to hope that they're proved wrong. I think as games evolve and become less reliant on Hollywood for their cultural leads, we'll see the gender divide begin to even out. Interesting new narrative games like Mass Effect and Heavy Rain are already showing that well-drawn female characters can bring added depth and resonance to the experience, while in the rising social and casual sectors things are much more healthily equal.

What you want, or what you should want, is the best lead for the specific game you're playing. You can't say gender shouldn't be an issue, because it always is; it's the fundamental binary decision a games designer or script writer makes about a character. The decision always means something, whether we want to acknowledge that or not. At the moment it might just mean that Activison wants to sell more games to a core audience that wants to be male.